Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester (27 page)

“Did you call, Garibaldi?”

It was Thompson.

“Yeah. Get me the hell out of here. This doesn’t go anywhere.”

“That means…”

“Yep. It means he’s still up there, somewhere.”

“Oh, shit. I…”

Then Thompson made an odd noise.

“What was that, Thompson?”

Silence. Then a sort of muted chuckle.

“Well. Mr. Garibaldi. We meet again. And under very odd circumstances, I must say. I always knew you were beneath me, but to have it brought home so graphically, well, it’s really quite amusing.”

“Bester. Damn you, I’ll…”

“Sorry. No time for chit-chat. I’ll be back in a few minutes, though.”

Bester closed the garbage chute and surveyed his handiwork. Thompson was down but still breathing, and would probably continue to. The big telepath wasn’t so lucky. He had shot him in the head, first thing, while he was concentrating on taking the inhibitions off Marie and Pierre. Crude and amateurish, but he was a P12 and Bester still wasn’t as strong as he ought to be.

Bester had sparked out the police officer and Paul-they would recover any moment now. Only Thompson had given him a minute of real worry. Someone had removed the failsafe he had planted in the ex-EarthForce officer, so he’d had to clobber him. Fortunately, the teep had been busy talking to Garibaldi.

Garibaldi, who would die next. But first Bester had something else to attend to.

It had all worked out pretty well, really. It had taken him only a few moments to do what was needed to Marie and Pierre-both were pretty weak-minded, and after all, he didn’t do much to them. He planted the very strong suggestion that he had gone down the garbage chute, forbade them to remember his real exit, then forbade them to get up and walk around. None of these suggestions bore the force of permanence, though quick had also meant brutal. At the very least the two were going to suffer bad dreams for a few weeks.

What he had actually done, before his pursuers had arrived, was leave the apartment, cross the hall, and knock on a neighboring door. The sleepy tenant who answered had been easy to control, and better yet, single. The door had been shut, his new host down for the count, for about ten seconds when he heard the lift open.

For several long moments he could do nothing but wait, and hope, and make himself appear as an empty place in the universe.

When he heard some of them come tearing back out, and the lift went down, he knew his plan had worked. Yes, part one had gone very well-it was good to know he could still improvise.

Time for part two. He found a roll of heavy tape in the kitchen and used it to bind up everyone who was still alive. He taped their mouths shut, too-everyone except the cop, Girard. He prodded Girard awake, scanning as he did so.

“What a complicated life you have,” he said to Girard, as the cop’s eyes flickered open.

“Not one woman, but two. I’ve never really understood that, myself. I’ve never been able to be in love with more than one woman at a time. Here you have two, and you may lose them both because of your greed. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Murderer.”

“Ah. You want to change the subject. Good enough, I don’t have time to be polite. We’re going to use your link to make a call. You’re going to tell them that Paul admitted it was all a ruse, that I’ve been gone for hours, and that I’m on the train to Amsterdam. I’ll give you all of the information. Now, before you can object, let me tell you why you are going to do this, and why you’ll do it just as I say.

See, I could make you do it, but that would be very painful for you, and more important, fatiguing for me. On the other hand, I can easily slip into your mind, hear your every word before you say it. I’ll know if you plan to betray me. If you try that, not only will you not have a chance of succeeding, but I’ll kill one of these people and then we’ll try again. And again, until you get it right. Do you understand?”

The policeman looked at him with a weary sort of comprehension.

“Yes.”

“Good. Here’s the information. And make it believable.”

Girard performed flawlessly.

“Perfect,” Bester told him, patting his head.

“You’ve just saved a few lives.”

He wrapped a piece of tape around Girard’s head. Then, carrying the dead teep’s pistol, he went back into the bathroom to kill Garibaldi.

Garibaldi had felt like a sucker plenty of times in his life, but this was going to stand out as the high point-the Olympus Mons of sucker hood - if he managed to survive it.

And Lise wasn’t going to like this story, not at all. Best not to tell her. Of course, when it hit the papers - well, that might take a while. If Bester killed everyone who knew he’d come down here, they might dust miss the body until the smell started percolating. That did it. Yep, he was panicking. He always got silly when he panicked.

He strained at the chute again, as if by some miracle the physics of the situation might suddenly change. But the mechanical problem stayed the same. Try as he might, he couldn’t climb up.

He might get better purchase if he dropped his PPG, but at the moment that was his one and only chance. Bester might not know he had a gun, and he might get off the first lucky shot.

He doubted that Bester would leave something like that to chance, though. He’d probably heat up a pan of oil and dump it on him first, something like that. He rolled his eyes. Perfect.

He was thinking of things to help Bester out, just on the off chance Bester hadn’t thought of them himself. Could he be scanned from up there? Did a tiny glimpse of him constitute line of sight? Probably.

Even in a straight-up exchange of gunfire, he would lose. PPG shots were globs of super-hot phased helium plasma. Once they made contact with any surface they began to lose integrity. With this angle, he might be able to sort of blister his enemy’s face. Meanwhile, Bester had a variety of weapons to choose from, including slug throwers, which would work much better in this situation.

He couldn’t wait for that. He had to do something. It had already been too long-what, five minutes? Ten? Bester wouldn’t hang around much longer.

He couldn’t go up. He had tried to flex like Hercules and break the chute with the mighty strength of his limbs-no luck there, not even the slightest reason to hope.

He couldn’t go down, either.

“Wait a minute,” he breathed.

Why couldn’t he go down? What was he standing on, anyway? Not the foundation-he hadn’t dropped far enough for that. He raised his right heel the full five inches he could manage, and kicked down. Kicked again. Something gave, slightly. He kicked with the other foot, then punched down with both feet.

“Making a lot of noise down there, Mr. Garibaldi.”

Bester’s voice sounded as if it were right in his ear, and for an instant he thought it must be telepathy. His skin crawled to think Bester might once again be in his head. But, no, it was just the acoustics of the shaft.

He fired up the chute without looking. Jumped and kicked, fired again. Jumped and kicked.

The air grew warm in the chute, thanks to the dispersing plasma. But something was certainly giving way beneath him. He fired again, and this time the PPG didn’t recharge. He dropped it, and used his arms as best he could to shove down, down, against the weakening floor of the shaft. At least he desperately hoped it was weakening.

Something finally broke beneath his feet, and he fell until his upper body caught in the too-small opening, nearly dislocating his arm. At the same moment, something like an angry hornet stung his ear. He wriggled frantically, his feet kicking free in a large, open space, his upper body still stuck in the shaft.

Then something hammered unbelievably hard into the top of his shoulder, and he was through, falling free.

Then slamming into something that broke with a lot of noise. That part wasn’t even so bad; all of the air had been knocked out of him by whatever had hit his shoulder. He grunted and sat up. He was on the ruins of a coffee table, in the middle of someone’s living room. The some ones, an elderly couple, gaped at him from a dingy sofa.

“Hi. Sorry,” he managed.

A dizzying wave of pain hit him as he stood. His left arm hung like a noodle, and he realized that he was bleeding, though not heavily. A bullet had shattered his collarbone, but not penetrated any further into his body. He looked up at the gaping hole in the roof of the apartment, then, thinking better of remaining beneath it, moved aside. With Garibaldi’s luck, even a blind ricocheting shot might hit him right between the eyes. Or maybe Bester had grenades, who knew?

Bester. A floor or two above him! He picked up the drained PPG and popped another charge into it.

The old people were yelling at him, now - in French, naturally.

“Okay, okay. Keep your shirts on. I’m not here to hurt you. And I’m going. If I were you, I’d do the same, at least for the next hour or two.”

He didn’t wait to see if they understood him or not, but found their front door and left as fast as he could, which, given the fact that the world was doing a slow spin, wasn’t too fast.

Back in the hall, he located the stairs and stumbled toward them.

Chapter 14

Bester left Paul’s apartment in a hurry, cursing and wondering exactly where Garibaldi had gone. The ancient shaft must have ended in someone’s ceiling, which probably meant he was a floor or two down. Bester’s second shot had drawn a flash of pain, but he couldn’t tell how badly he had hurt the ex-security officer.

Not badly enough, in all likelihood. He decided to take the stairs. At least there he could reverse direction quickly, and he wouldn’t be trapped in a box. Of course, Garibaldi would be thinking the same thing.

The disadvantage was that he had to pocket his weapon briefly to open the stairwell door, which was precisely when the lift opened. He spun and reached for his weapon at the same time. Then, to his vague surprise, he saw that it wasn’t Garibaldi, but a uniformed young man with a mustache and close-cropped hair, accompanied by a similarly dressed, dark-haired, pretty woman. The man’s eyes widened, but he acted quickly, pushing the woman down and firing well before Bester even had his pistol out. Bester heard a dull hiss and something struck him sharply in the chest.

It didn’t stop him from returning the fire. His first shot missed, but the second took the fellow in the thigh as he ducked back into the lift. The doors closed again.

Bester took the moment to pocket his weapon and yank the stairwell door open again. Only then did he examine his chest. A small hypo-dart stood out from it. He yanked it out. What was it? A knockout drug?

Bester ran down the stairs, determined to get as far away as possible before the drug took effect. He could only hope that Girard’s orders had been taken seriously, that the cordon around the neighborhood at least had some holes in it now. He was almost to the ground floor when he heard the first-floor door above him open, and then a hoarse, familiar shout.

“Bester!”

He looked up to see a bloody Garibaldi taking aim. He threw himself to the left and fired just as a PPG burst sizzled by. Though his arm was grazed, Garibaldi stood his ground, ignoring Bester’s shot, and fired again.

Bester leapt over the rail, dropping five feet. It felt like twenty might have, in his prime. His knees didn’t like it at all. Behind him, Garibaldi said something colorfully slanderous about Bester’s sex life. Well, I hit him, at least, Bester thought, as he kicked the door open to the ground floor corridor and made for the outside door.

It should slow him down, and we seem to be even in the arm department. No one seemed to notice him as he bolted out onto the street, and he didn’t wait around to give any remaining hunters a chance. He ran, thinking how odd it was that he was running at all. If the dart had contained something to knock him down, it should have done so by now. Could it have been empty, by mistake? He was feeling a little queasy, but that was all. He turned a corner, changed direction as often as he could.

He needed a goal. Where was he going?

For the time being, he would simply settle for getting out of the immediate area. Then he would have a little more opportunity to think. His lungs started to burn, and between one footfall and the next something turned around in his mind. He was fifteen again, racing through the same darkened city. He had broken the academy rules, set out after a dangerous rogue on his own, and tracked her to Paris. It was the first time he had been in a city other than Geneva, where Teeptown was located, and Paris had come as a revelation.

That was when he learned that the city had its own mind, of sorts, a voice that was really millions of voices. That was where he had met Sandoval Bey, the mentor who had changed his life. And now, so many years later, he was running through these same streets.

And again his lungs were burning. Of course the first time, they had burned because one of them had a hole punched through it, not because of his age. Still, that boy of fifteen would have been caught long before now. What he had lost physically was more than made up for by what he had gained in experience. And Paris still sang to him.

No-it didn’t. He realized that what had put him on that train of thought was the itchy feeling that something was missing. It was. He couldn’t p’hear anything. Anything.

Even at his weariest, he should be getting a background hum. But the silence in his head was as profound as if he were in space, solo, a light-year from any other mind. The answer came to him like a cold, frozen hand on his chest. He remembered his psychic duel with the teep, earlier that night, the one he had shot with his partner’s hypo-gun, the one whose power had just suddenly drained away. Sleepers. The hypos contained sleepers.

Once before he had taken them, as a condition for conducting an investigation on Babylon 5. It had been unpleasant, but he had dealt with it. This would be much harder to deal with.

He turned another corner. The darkness seemed to be wrapping around him, collapsing of its own dead weight. Dead was a good word-the world felt dead, lifeless around him. And he was alone in that dead world. The first time, he had at least had someone to talk to-Garibaldi, in fact, of all people.